the heroism of everyday human life

My favorite actors at this time are Mark Ruffalo, Paul Dano, and Patrick Wilson.  Among films that I watched in the past year that I really studied (i.e., wrote about), I list as favorites: L.I.E., Hard Candy, Little Children, and Me and You and Everyone We Know.

Tonight I read some more in Lois Lowry's The Giver.  Jonas (the protagonist) has a weird thing happen to him sometimes: he's looking at something and it changes.  That's the verb that's used, without further qualification: it "changes."  Turns out what is happening is he is suddenly shifting into seeing in color (in the future society in which the book is set, people have been genetically rigged to be color-blind).  Specifically, he's glimpsing the color red.  This shift (and then back again) occurs when he views: an apple, the faces of an assembled audience from the vantage of the stage, a girl's hair.  

The book is about the withholding of knowledge--for example, the knowledge of sex from children, the knowledge of death.  It occurred to me originally that perhaps what Jonas saw (the "change" that flickered in his field of vision) was (since he is supposed to be gifted, a "seer") the warp of decay, the buckling in matter.  Namely, that he had scouted out the presence (taboo) of death--like the poet.  When I had this idea I felt an immense emotional charge, a shuddering in my body, a cold spell.  I also had in my mind at the same time the bit of dialogue in Little Children, delivered by the old mother to the sex offender: "what makes us different from animals is that we know, we all know, that at any minute, the things we love, the people we love, can all be taken away from us...and yet we go on anyway..."  Words to that effect.  (And I also had in my mind, in this constellation of associated instances, Mark Ruffalo in a recent interview on Fresh Air talking about the removal of a benign brain tumor: how he wanted so badly to be good in In the Cut to prove to himself that he wasn't permanently debilitated, hadn't lost his touch--despite the cognitive dissociation he had felt in recovery.)  On my misreading, that moment in The Giver (like the old mother's words in Little Children) heroizes our everyday facing of mortality; suddenly, we become heroic, our scale is magnified to the near-mythic.  Thus the poet wishes to dwell on death to put his life in a heroic perspective, wishes to feel chosen--feels that the contemplation of death makes him special, and he feels charged with a mystical energy.  Having these thoughts, I felt emotionally overwhelmed, could have shed tears: indeed, I felt my emotional need(iness) at the moment and the wanting to share with another person my emotional life, the existential excesses of my embodied presence--by, for instance, reading poetry aloud to them (instead of to my parrot).

I think a "message" of the film Little Children is the message voiced by the mother about living with the awareness that what we love, the people we love, at any moment, can all be taken away from us..."  It is this formal awareness of brevity and fragility that Kate Winslet's character finally learns to adopt as a modus operandi of living.  And this from a filmmaker whose previous film, "In the Bedroom," was about parents suffering the tragic loss of their child, a young man.